"If I were to reside here, you of course would treat me courteously so long as I was a gentleman in my deportment?" "Certainly; but you are an individual.”

"But if two individuals can live peacefully, why not ten,or a hundred, a thousand, all?"

-

She hesitated a moment; and then, with flashing eyes and flushed countenance, which added charms to her beauty, said, "Well, it is hard and you will not think any worse of me for saying it to have your friends killed, your servants all taken away, your lands confiscated; and then know that you have failed, that you have been whipped. I wish that we had the power to whip you; but we have n't, and must make the best of it. What we are to do I don't know. We have been able to have everything that money could buy, and now we have n't a dollar. I don't care anything about keeping the negroes in slavery; but there is one feeling which we Southerners have that you cannot enter into. My old mamma who nursed me is just like a mother to me; but there is one thing that I never will submit to, that the negro is our equal. He belongs to an inferior race."

She laid down the argument in the palm of her hand with a great deal of emphasis.

"Your energy, boldness, and candor are admirable. If under defeat and disaster you sat down supinely and folded your hands, there would be little hope of your rising again; but your determination to make the best of it shows that you will adapt yourself readily to the new order of things. There never will be complete equality in society. Political and social equality are separate and distinct. Rowdies and ragamuffins have natural rights: they may have a right to vote, they may be citizens; but that does not necessarily entitle them to free entrance into our homes.

The idea was evidently new to the young lady, — and not only to her, but to all in the room. To them the abolition of slavery was the breaking down of all social distinctions. So long as the negro was compelled to enter the parlor as a servant, they could endure his presence; but freedom implied the possibility, they imagined, of his entrance as an equal, entitled to a place at their firesides and a seat at their tables. The thought was intolerable.

The poor whites of the South are far below the colored people in ability and force of character. They are a class from which there is little to hope. Nothing rouses their ambition. Like the Indians, they are content with food for today; to-morrow will take care of itself. In the cities they swarm along the sides of buildings on sunny days, and at night crawl into their miserable cabins with little more aspiration than dogs that seek their kennels. Undoubtedly there is far less suffering among the poor of the Southern cities than among the poor of New York, where life is ever, a struggle with want. The South has a milder climate, nature requires less labor for production, and the commercial centres are not overcrowded. The poor whites of the South maintain no battle with starvation, but surrender resignedly to poverty. They can exist without much labor, and are too indolent to strive to rise to a higher level of existence. The war has taken their best blood. Only shreds and dregs remain.

"What can be done for the poor whites?"

It is a momentous question for the consideration of philanthropists and statesmen.

They are very ignorant. Their dialect is a mixture of English and African, having words and phrases belonging to neither language; though the patois is not confined to this class, but is sometimes heard in sumptuously furnished parlors. "I suppose that you will not be sorry when the war is over," I remarked to a lady in Savannah.

"No, sir. I reckon the Confederacy is done gone for," was the reply.

It is reported that a North Carolina colonel of cavalry was heard to address his command thus," "Tention, battalion. Prepare to gen orto yer critter. Git!"

The order to ride rapidly was, "Dust right smart!"

You hear young ladies say, Paw, for Pa, Maw, for Ma, and then, curiously adding another vowel sound, they say kear for car, thear for there.

The poor whites of the country are called "poor white trash," "crokers," "clay-eaters," "sand-hillers," and "swamp angels," by the educated whites. There is no homogeneity of white society. The planters, as a rule, have quite as much respect for the negroes as for the shiftless whites.

Yet these miserable wretches are exceedingly bitter against the North it is the bitterness of ignorance, -— brutal, cruel, fiendish, produced by caste, by the spirit of slavery. There is more hope, therefore, of the blacks, in the future, than of this degraded class. The colored people believe that the people of the North are their friends. Freedom, food, schools, all were given by the Yankees; hence gratitude and confidence on the part of the freedmen; hence, on the part of the poor whites, hatred of the North and cruelty toward the negro. Idleness, not occupation, has been, and is, their normal condition. It is ingrained in their nature to despise work. Indolence is a virtue, laziness no reproach. Thus slavery arrayed society against every law of God, moral and physical.

The poor whites were in bondage as well as the blacks, and to all appearance will remain so, while the natural buoyancy of the negro makes him rise readily to new exigencies; with freedom he is at once eager to obtain knowledge and acquire landed estates.

The colored people who had taken up lands on the islands under General Sherman's order met for consultation in the Slave Market, at the corner of St. Julian Street and Market Square. I passed up the two flights of stairs down which thousands of slaves had been dragged, chained in coffle, and entered a large hall. At the farther end was an elevated platform about eight feet square, the auctioneer's block. The windows were grated with iron. In an anteroom at the right women had been stripped and exposed to the gaze of brutal men. A colored man was praying when I entered, giving thanks to God for the freedom of his race, and asking for a blessing on their undertaking. After prayers they broke out into singing. Lieutenant Ketchum of General Saxton's staff, who had been placed in charge of the confiscated lands, was present, to answer their questions.

"I would like to know what title we shall have to our lands, or to the improvements we shall make?" was the plain question of a tall black man.

"You will have the faith and honor of the United States," was the reply.

Rev. Mr. French informed them that the government could not give them deeds of the land, but that General Sherman had

issued the order, and without doubt President Lincoln would see it was carried out. "Can't you trust the President who gave you your freedom?" he asked.

A stout man, with a yellow complexion, rose in the centre of the house: "I have a house here in the city. I can get a good living here, and I don't want to go to the islands unless I can be assured of a title to the land; and I think that is the feeling of four fifths present."

"That's so!" "Yes, brother!" was responded.

There was evidently a reluctance to becoming pioneers in such an enterprise, to leaving the city unless the guaranty were sure. Another man rose. "My bredren, I want to raise cotton, and I'm gwine."

It was a short but effective speech. With keen, sharp intellect, he had comprehended the great commercial question of the day. He knew that it would pay to raise cotton on lands which had been held at fabulous prices when the staple was worth but ten or fifteen cents. He was going to improve the opportunity to raise cotton, even if he did not become a holder of the estate.

"I'm gwine ye, brudder!" "So will I!" and there was a general shaking of hands as if that were sealing a contract. Having determined to go, they joined in singing "The Freedmen's Battle-Hymn," sung as a solo and repeated in chorus:

.FREEDMEN'S BATTLE-HYMN.

The colored soldiers of Foster's army sang it at the battle of Honey Hill, while preparing to go into the fight. How gloriously it sounded now, sung by five hundred freedmen in the Savannah slave-mart, where some of the singers had been sold in days gone by! It was worth a trip from Boston to Savannah to hear it.

The next morning, in the same room, I saw a school of one hundred colored children assembled, taught by colored teachers, who sat on the auctioneer's platform, from which had risen voices of despair instead of accents of love, brutal cursing instead of Christian teaching. I listened to the recitations, and heard their songs of jubilee. The slave-mart transformed to a school-house! Civilization and Christianity had indeed begun their beneficent work.